Comcast Is Very Concerned About Your Cocker Spaniels

David is a little confused. First, because received a Comcast bill for two months of service, even though he already submitted a payment. Second, because some denizen of Kabletown has started turning ordinary customer service e-mails in to Mad Libs. Or spell check has gone horribly awry. Or…actually, we’re not quite sure what’s going on here.

David sent a terse e-mail about his billing problem that did not include any references to dogs. Here are the first two paragraphs of Comcast’s reply.

Dear David,

Thank you for contacting Comcast Email Support. My name is [redacted] and I appreciate the time you took to contact us about your billing inquiry.

I understand that you made a payment online with the amount of $170.62, and you just received a bill statement for two(2) months including March. Also you are asking what happen to the payment. I know that it is important for you to determine if the payment you made online has been process for you to be bill accurately. I will be more than happy to provide you the information for you to verify what happen to the payment that you had made. Rest assured that this email will bring your cockers to a resolution.

The e-mail continues in clearly-not-proofread fashion, but with no further random animal name insertions.

If anyone out there has any ideas about where the word “cockers” came from in this message, we–and David–are all ears. Long, floppy, curly-haired ears.

Not only that but Laura seems to actually take the time to read the comments with her articles so is more likely to make corrections that we all love to whine so much about.

[waving] Hi Laura!

I think most of these articles could be far more useful and interesting if the Consumerist authors got involved in the comments and could clarify things as they come up in comments. I read a lot of other sites where the authors aren’t afraid (or prohibited) to comment on their own articles.

“I know that it is important for you to determine if the payment you made online has been process for you to be bill accurately.” & “cockers”
This is likely an auto-reply bot with some mistakes in the programming or as said by others, an English as a second language issue.

Exactly! I actually take calls for Comcast (I’m outsourced, but still in North America) – the majority of phone support is in NA but the chat support is usually in Costa Rica or the Philippines. It’s often as frustrating for us as CAE’s as it is for customers.

Never, ever, ever communicate with large companies via the interwebs. Unless you enjoy getting “snips” from people who live in India and are one their 3rd day of ESL, as demonstrated here.

What a snip is: a small sentence fragment that’s been turned into a button so people who don’t know english/are lazy don’t have to type it out, shortening their work time. For example, many companies will have a vertical menu to the left of their screen that has a list of common response fragments…
“I am sorry to hear that”
“Please understand we”
“I appreciate the time you took to contact us regarding”
“I understand you are looking to”

They click a button, assemble an email of nonsensical sentence fragments, add in a few details “to show they read the initial email” and bam, response fired out in 2 minutes, saving the company a 30 minute phone call (and therefore 30 minutes of man hours). When you have a REALLY new person that tries hard to overachieve, they sometimes add in their own words that spell check will ruin. They don’t even notice because spell check is an amazing english translation service to them.

I hate it. I’ve done it, my husband did it for years. It’s all a bunch of “we really don’t give a crap about you, just your money” BS.